James M. McPherson is one of the most distinguished historians of the American Civil War alive today. Not only did he win the Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 book, "The Battle Cry of Freedom," perhaps THE definitive one-volume history of the war, he has also been a Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, won Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history, and served as 2003 president of the American Historical Association.

Most recently, he is the author of "War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865," which formed the basis for his George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History at the 2014 annual meeting of the AHA.